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What advertisers should be learning from PR pros

As dapper an environment as the venerated offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce might seem, anyone who watches “Mad Men” will tell you that no agency, even when fictitious, is without its share of problems. Advertising Age suggests that one of those problems may just be a marketer’s inability to adapt to a society whose focus on social media has driven the need for “a new model of interacting with the public”—something advertisers could learn to do from their PR counterparts.

A PR approach to communication certainly came in handy when a crisis arose at ESPN after 22-year-old Sarah Phillips, a contributor, used her glossy position to scam people on the Internet. And while the details of her case (and even Phillips’ identity) are still unclear, Bleacher Report used the occasion to highlight some of sports media’s craziest scandals.

A sports legend in his own right, Kazaam Shaquille O’Neal has reportedly earned his Ph.D. in education from Miami University following his doctoral dissertation titled “How Leaders Utilize Humor or Seriousness in Leadership Roles.” Is that about Kobe?

Keeping itself from going bankrupt, Hulu is looking to a new revenue model it calls “authentication,” which as the New York Post indicates, could mean an end to all the free streaming of your favorite TV programs. Sorry, cable cutters.

Meanwhile, Target has grown tiresome of being undercut by online retailers. On Wednesday, the store announced it would no longer carry Amazon's Kindle e-reader. This shadows an emergent and troublesome consumer practice where shoppers use brick-and-mortar outlets as showrooms for products that they later purchase online for a cheaper price.

The common practice of airbrushing this and photoshopping that in the glossy pages of Seventeen magazine landed it at the center of 14-year-old Julia Bluhm’s quest to curb image manipulation. Here are five things to know about the teenage rebel-raiser and her initiative.

Ashton Kutcher, on the other hand, is simply raising eyebrows. The actor has been slammed for a new (and already pulled) ad campaign for Popchips in which the former “That 70’s Show” star sports “brownface” and traditional Indian garb to appear as a Bollywood producer named Raj. Says a spokesperson for the snack brand: “[It] was created to provoke a few laughs and was never intended to stereotype or offend anyone," who adds, “We hope people can enjoy this in the spirit it was intended."

Certainly, the devout Tim Tebow would never partake in such a societal taboo, which is probably why even though the football star failed to respond to an Iowa teen’s request to escort her to the prom, she still went with him anyway … in a cardboard cutout.